Briefing for a Descent into Hell Part 18

No, I am very sure that Charles Watkins was not at any time in Yugoslavia. I am unable to account for his insistance that he was there during the war. When I got back from the war, I was in fairly bad shape. This is what Charles and I had in common. We spent some months together in a cottage I had in Cornwall. We both talked a good deal about our experiences. This probably cured us both. Even after this lapse of time I could give you a pretty detailed account of Charles' war, which is almost as vivid to me as "my" war. I find my memories of my two descents into Yugoslavia the most vivid of my life. If I were to forget those months, I would be forgetting events and people who formed me more fundamentally than any other. I suppose I could be regarded as lucky. I know that Charles thinks-or thought-that I was. "My" war was very different from his. I couldn't say that I enjoyed "my" war, but it was certainly like being in a highly coloured dream, whereas I am afraid Charles' war must have been like a long tedious nightmare. He had very much more than his fair share of boring repet.i.tious slog, if you can agree that danger can be boring.

If I may intrude a personal note that is probably beyond what you asked for from me, I find the current scene frightening because yet again great numbers of young people, whether for or against war, whether they would welcome conscription or not, don't know that the worst thing about war is that it can be so boring. I would never have believed that such a very short s.p.a.ce of time-twenty-five years-would have again made it possible to see war as glamorous. The point is, you see, that "my" war was, rather, or for some of the time. Whereas Charles used to say that "his" war's fortunes were maximum hard routine work, maximum physical discomfort, maximum boredom, and pretty steady doses of danger and death. This wasn't necessarily true for all the men who got dealt his particular hand-Dunkirk, North Africa, Italy, Second Front. Some had quite extensive patches of respite and even enjoyment. But Charles' luck was different. In fact it was a bit of a joke between us, when we traced his course of events, how he always seemed to have missed out on possible leave, or a lucky transfer to somewhere easier. We used to say that he had been fighting a modern war, for five years-I mean, of course, modern for then, he was fighting the Second World War-but that I had regressed to a much earlier style of war. Of course that is a pretty unsatisfactory generalisation when you think of the contribution guerrilla fighting made to our winning the war.

If Charles believes that I am dead, perhaps it might help to see that I am not?

Sincerely, MILES BOVEY.

DEAR DOCTOR X,.

I am only too happy to come and see Charles any time it will help him. But I don't want to bring James and Philip to see their father. I don't think they ought to have that inflicted on them. I must say that I am surprised you suggest it at all. I know Charles is ill, but other people in the family are as important as he is. Of course it does not matter that it is painful for me to see Charles as he is now, but the boys are fifteen and fourteen years old and should be spared such things at their age. So I am afraid I am refusing to bring them.

Yours sincerely, FELICITY WATKINS.

DEAR DOCTOR Y,.

Of course I am ready at any time to have my husband home. It will be very painful for us all, but I would do anything to help him get well again if you think it will help. I am sure that once he is in his own home and with his family and his own things around him he will remember who he is.

Yours sincerely, FELICITY WATKINS.

It was ten in the morning. In a large public room on the first floor, which overlooked a formal pattern of flowerbeds now dug over and left exposed to catch the first frosts, a couple of beeches in their end-of-year colouring, and some late-flowering roses, sat, or lounged, about forty or fifty people. None looked out of the windows. They were of any age, size, type and of both s.e.xes. But the middle-aged predominated, and particularly, middle-aged women. Some watched television, or rather, since the programme had not yet started, were looking at the test picture, of some water rushing down over some rocks, under spring trees in full flower. Some knitted. Some chatted. It would be easy to think that one had walked into the lounge of a second-rate or provincial hotel, except for the characteristic smell of drugs.

There were tables as well as easy chairs dotted about the room, and at a table in full centre, which was spread all over with a particularly complicated game of patience, sat a young girl, all by herself. She was a brunette, of a Mediterranean type. She had smooth dark hair, large black eyes, olive skin. She was slender, but rounded, but not excessively the latter, thus conforming both to current ideas about beauty in women, and that moment's fashion. She wore a black crepe dress that fitted her smoothly over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and hips. The sleeves were long and tight. The neck was high and close. The dress had simple white linen cuffs and a round white collar. These were slightly grubby. This dress would have been appropriate for a housekeeper, a perfect secretary, or a Victorian young lady spending a morning with her accounts, if it had not ended four inches below the top of the thigh. In other words, it was a particularly lopped mini-dress. It would be hard to imagine a type of dress more startling as a mini-dress. The contrast between its severity, its formality, and the long naked legs was particularly shocking: it shocked. The girl's legs were not quite bare. She wore extremely fine pale grey tights. But she did not wear any panties. She sat with her legs sprawled apart in a way that suggested that she had forgotten about them, or that she had enough to do to control and manage the top half of her, without all the trouble of remembering her legs and her s.e.x as well. Her private parts were evident as a moist dark fuzzy patch, and their exposure gave her a naive, touching, appealing look.

There were two female nurses sitting among the patients. Both were poor women, badly paid, working cla.s.s, and were only here because their husbands were not paid enough to keep a family according to the standards which television promises the nation as its right. These women looked at the young girl more often than at any other patient. It was with a resentment that ten times the wage they earned would not have been enough to a.s.suage.

Both had female children, adolescents; and both were familiar with fights over makeup and dresses. One woman liked her daughter in very short dresses and plenty of makeup, and the other did not, but this difference between them had vanished under the pressure of a profounder disquiet. It was because of the violent battles both had with this girl, Violet, whose mini-dresses were shorter even than fashion demanded, and which both thought disgusting, even without the fact that she refused to wear panties. And her accusations of them, the nurses (mother-and-authority-figures, as both had been trained to understand very well) that they were old-fashioned, girl-hating, s.e.x-hating, old, and so forth, were exactly the same, but exactly, word for word as both had during their fights with their own daughters. The fact that Violet was crazy, and that she used their own daughters' arguments for not wearing panties, so that she always looked provocative and was a source of trouble with already unstable male patients, was seditious of the framework of ordinary morality. Of course, one nurse's framework was very much more liberal-the one who was happy to let her daughter wear mini-skirts and make up her eyes with false lashes and loads of coloured grease-than the other's; but to both of them the thought was brought home several times a day, that these stands, liberal, and old-fashioned, stands on which both women prided themselves, were made to look irrelevant and even ridiculous by Miss Violet Stoke's sitting there with her legs apart showing everything she had got. And on principle. In the name of freedom, the rights of youth, and the advancement of womanhood. Both women had confessed to themselves, to each other, and to doctors that of all the patients in their charge, Violet made it hardest to maintain self-control. They were prepared to say that they hated her, an att.i.tude which some of the doctors in authority deplored, as lacking in insight and control, and others applauded, as showing a releasing honesty and frankness-releasing to the patient as much as to themselves. They both knew quite well that her way of sitting there, dressed in a parody of a housekeeper's dress with her s.e.x on view was a challenge to their sanity. Besides, she was not washing as much as she ought (a very familiar sign of her illness) and she smelled, apart from smelling sickly from the drugs.

She was also beautiful, and in an exotic and un-British way.

She sat alone, for she knew she had always been alone. She was playing patience because it is a game that is played alone. All around her, if only people had the eyes to see it, was a s.p.a.ce where flickered and darted flames of hatred, a baleful fire. She was isolated by this aura of hatred, which only she knew about. She was aware that the two middle-aged women observed her more than they did the others, but she did not see them as they were, poor women doing an unpleasant job because they were not qualified for better paid jobs. She saw them three times lifesize, arbitrarily powerful, dangerous, frightening. She hated them wholeheartedly because they were middle-aged, dowdy, tired, suburban, poor, and because that morning and for the last week of mornings they had told her she must put on panties as well as tights, and that she looked disgusting, and that their task was difficult enough without having men getting excited on her account, and that she was selfish, antisocial, disobedient.

When she looked at them, she was possessed by a young person's terror that she was looking at her own future, for it so happened that her life had taught her very early that it was easy, and indeed, common, to be young and pretty and gay, and then soon afterwards, to be middle-aged, tired and disregarded.

In some of Goya's earlier pictures, not those that describe war or madness, but the gay and gallant pictures, there is something that disturbs, but you don't know what it is. Not at first. It is because of any group of those people, the charming, the formal, the pastoral, the essentially civilised, there is always one that looks straight out of the group, out of the canvas, into the eyes of the person who is looking at the picture. This person who refuses to conform to the conventions of the picture the artist has set him in, questions and, in fact, destroys the convention. It is as if the artist said to himself: I suppose I've got to paint this kind of picture, it is expected of me-but I'll show them. As you stand and gaze in, all the rest of the picture fades away, the charmers in their smiles and flounces, the young heroes, the civilisation, all these dissolve away because of that long straight gaze from the one who looks back out of the canvas and says silently that he or she knows it is all a load of old socks. He is there to tell you that he thinks so.

The eyes of Violet Stoke had the same effect, that of negating the rest of her appearance-and perhaps of saying the same thing.

As if it were all not enough of a challenge, the shocking contrast between formal black dress and the lower nakedness, the smooth dancer's hair and the sad moist patch below, the social position of "the cardplayer" and the isolation spread around her by her fear and hatred, as if these were not enough (to which must be added the social and possibly less important comment made by the expensiveness of her dress, shoes, handbag, any of which was a week's salary for the poor nurses) there was this other contrast. The girl's black eyes looked directly out of the picture, and if you followed that gaze, let yourself slide inwards, so that you slid into her head, what you became part of was not the violence of hatred, but a puddle of tears, and a little girl's tears at that: Oh love me, hold me, forgive me, and never let me go, don't make me grow up. What she was feeling inside that facade of upsetting contrasts, was what a very small girl feels when she has been beaten or ill-treated by a powerful parent, and she knows quite well it will happen again next time the parent is angry or drunk or frightened himself-or herself. She was all victim, betrayed, tormented, vulnerable, and a sponge for love.

She had been sitting there, playing patience in a way which was the cry: Why do you all make me stay alone like this? when into the public room came a tall good-looking man of about fifty. He had wavy dark grey hair that had been black, he had blue eyes, he had a good smile.

Unlike others who had come in while she sat there, saying silently: I dare you to come and sit with me, and had gone to sit elsewhere, he went straight towards her, sat down, and immediately pulled a pipe out of his pocket and started on the business of filling and lighting it. He wore a casual jacket, and a dark blue sweater under it. He looked like a man who had been an amateur athlete.

He was Professor Charles Watkins and he and Violet were friends.

Now, without asking him, she swept her cards together and began dealing for a poker game which was a favourite of theirs, which meant that each played three hands, seven cards a hand, with four cards wild, and high-low into the bargain. She nearly always won these games, not because she was brighter than the Professor, but because she cared more.

"Threes, fives, sevens, Jacks wild," she announced, in a companionable girl's voice.

They played. She won.

She shuffled and said: "Did you see him today?"

"Yes, Doctor X is away."

"What did he say?"

"He says I've got to be moved somewhere. I can't go on here the way I am."

"Why, why can't you? Oh, it is too much!"

"He just keeps saying that this is a reception hospital and he can't bend the rules any more."

"Don't you let them send you to the North Catchment then, whatever else."

"Don't worry, I won't."

She dealt.

"Twos and sixes and Queens wild," she said.

They played in silence. She won.

"Haven't you got any money at all?" she cried, a petulant and wilful child, as it were demanding a new doll, or dress.

"The Professor is quite loaded, so they tell me," he said. "But that doesn't help me much, does it?"

"I could get a job and earn, I have had jobs. Never for long though."

"I'm sure I could too. I'm very handy around the wards, after all. I could wash up in a restaurant or work in a bar?"

"Would we earn enough to live on?"

"We could try."

"Oh do let's. Oh please."

"Yes ... we wouldn't-force each other. We wouldn't-impose."

"No. We'd help each other, I'm sure of that."

She dealt. It was for five cards.

"We'll play it straight, cool and cla.s.sical," she said.

They played. She won.

"Aren't you cheating at all?" he enquired.

This meant, was she identifying more than was inevitable with one or other of the hands she was playing, for in this personal version of poker they had evolved, the different hands stood for aspects of themselves. They might or might not know what each other's different hands stood for. But he knew now that when she dealt for the cla.s.sic game, this meant she was feeling calmer and more in control of her different selves than when she dealt three hands each and with so many cards wild. And so on.

Yesterday morning, she had let him win the first game, making it clear that it was because she knew he had had a bad night.

"Was I cheating? Did it look as if I was? I was trying not to."

"Well perhaps I was too, a little."

"But I won," she claimed fiercely. "I won, didn't I?"

"Yes, you did, Violet. You always do."

"Yes, I do, don't I?"

She dealt again, three hands each, five cards.

They played, she won.

"Are your sons coming to see you?"

"No. She won't bring them."

"Don't mind. Oh please don't. I'll go and make you some tea. Would you like some?"

"I'd like some tea, yes, but I don't mind that they aren't coming. What I mind is, that I don't mind, when they are so sure that I ought to. Who are they, though? I know you. I suppose you are my daughter. They say I haven't had a daughter?"

"Oh I wish I was your daughter. Oh I do so wish I were. But you'd be like the rest, I suppose."

"Perhaps I would. How do I know I am a good father to my sons? But that is then. You are now. I am good for you, Vi? Am I?"

"Yes. But you like me, you see. My families don't."

"Yes, I do like you Violet. Very much."

She went off to the little kitchen used by patients to make themselves tea, cocoa, toast, sandwiches. When she returned with two cups of tea, a woman patient had sat herself near the handsome and distinguished Professor, but at Violet's killing black glances, she hastily withdrew.

"I heard Doctor X say that Doctor Y favoured you unfairly."

"Yes, Doctor Y told me that too."

"And Doctor X said to Nurse Black that he thought it was possible you are shamming."

"That I do remember?"

"That you remember more than you let on."

"What I remember they won't have at any price, that's my trouble."

"Doctor X said there was a case last year when a man went on pretending he couldn't remember his wife, but then Doctor X caught him out and he had to go home."

"I don't remember my wife or my mistress. I am very attractive to women, that's clear enough. They both hate my guts."

"I don't think that is very funny, if you do."

"I'm sorry."

"I don't hate you."

"No, but you aren't a woman."

"No. Oh no, I'm not. Oh no, no."

"You look very like my girl, the one that was killed in Yugoslavia."

"You never were in Yugoslavia."

"But I-oh very well. I don't see why you should mind that."

"But I do mind. They know you weren't in Yugoslavia."

"All the same, you do look like her."

"Perhaps I am the first person that belongs to your new memory. I mean, the people in the ward and me and Doctor Y and Doctor X, we are what you've made your new memory out of?"

"Not Doctor X!"

"Oh, I don't know, I suppose he's not as bad as that. I mean, why do we all hate Doctor X? They aren't all that different, are they?"

"Yes. Oh yes, they are."

"Well all right, I'm sorry, oh, please don't get upset."

"All right."

"But when you do start remembering all the people in your life, what will happen to me? I mean, I was thinking last night, now I'm an important person in your mind ..."

"You are, you are, I promise you, Violet."

"But when it all comes back, I'll be one of-hundreds?"

"Perhaps it won't come back."

"When it does, will you want to be my friend?"

"I am sure I will."

"But she won't."

"Are you sure of that?"